The first “regular” match of the tournament
also feels like an unfair match-up. On the one side, we have a small-feeling book, The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa (a new name to me), on the other side we have the goliath, Percival Everett’s major publisher (how did this take so long?) debut coming on the heels of the triumph that was the film American Fiction (based on Everett’s novel Erasure).
The Book Censor’s Library puts us in an Orwellian dystopia where books are prohibited on not always clear grounds while an underground society attempts to preserve and circulate these prohibited works. I found myself, however, bothered by the fact that this was a book by a Kuwaiti author writing in Arabic and yet the books mentioned were all from the Anglo-American literary tradition. This makes sense from a marketing perspective, but kind of bothered me. Add in the fact that we’re already living in an Orwellian dystopia (at least in the U.S.) where censorship has become rampant and this was less an escape than a visit to Room 101.
James starts oddly with some minstrel songs presented in greyed-out type (the reason for this becomes clear later in the book) and starts out predictably enough replaying a scene from Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, but quickly Everett pulls the rug out from under us as we find James engaging in major code switching, speaking proper Johnsonian English when surrounded only by other Black characters while reverting to dialect in the presence of white people. The plot eventually diverges dramatically from Twain’s plot and moves fluidly between comedy and tragedy, but shows itself to be a masterwork of style and control. I originally started reading this book in a library copy, but fifty pages in, I returned the book to the library and bought my own copy because it’s just that good.
My pick to advance is James, and—spoiler alert—it will be my pick to go all the way. It’s just that good and anyone who disagrees clearly has no taste.
My judgment on the judgment
I was briefly worried about what Molly Templeton was going to decide when she wrote in her opening:
I did not want to read James. I generally do not want to read literary sweethearts until their time as sweethearts has passed, and I can read them with only lingering awareness of their initial popularity. It’s a little contrary, but it’s also a feeling that comes with being a perpetual rooter for the underdogs. I was very interested in The Book Censor’s Library.
But I needn’t have worried. Like everyone else who has read this book, she was immediately smitten and she made the right choice and she also picked James to advance. Seriously, people, this is the book of 2024. This will be taught in English classe one-hundred years from now (assuming, of course, that civilization survives the next one-hundred days).
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